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The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Third Sunday in Lent
Year B RCL
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22 click here for the readings 
One day I was singing a traditional hymn when my then Northern-Irish secretary overheard me and came to ask me how could I possible know such a tune from the old country. My response the American missionaries taught it to people from whom I heard it. Tradition as in “handing over” should not underestimated.
I remember entering the Methodist University Center, not far from where I lived in Havana, to visit with the local Methodist pastor. I used to hang out there, because Methodist youth was very welcoming and basically existed.
In the Episcopal Cathedral where I went regularly we were down to the twelve “apostles” with a very aged “mary”, there was no question of youth program.
This was the first time where I found what I have called later in my adult years the Cuban-American mission. By such term I described the remnants of the American conducted mission work in Cuba after Independence in 1902. It lived on well after the embargo was declared over fifty years ago.
I was a new Christian, with no images of Jesus at home to use as reference, finally I met the Jesus of my new found protestant identity, right there by the secretary desk’s phone -she herself appeared never to have left the fifties down to the outfit and glasses- hanging from the wall outside the methodist Bishop’s office I met for the first time the Jesus as seen by Sallman in his 1940 “head of Christ”. 500 million copies were printed and for some people at the time it was used as talisman of sorts in the height of Mcarthysm, but now in the seventies, in the capital of communist Cuba.
Sallman’s Jesus is clean, safe, passive, all the hair in its proper place and the staged gaze and I will add “nice” which is perhaps why Christians have plastered this image in many a child's Sunday school room. I am sure, that intellectually in the forties people knew that was one interpretation of Jesus image, many emotionally related to his painting.
It's hard to fathom why such a harmless and respectable looking citizen would ever be arrested, beaten to a pulp, and crucified by establishment authorities; he wouldn't hurt a flea.(Dan Clendenin).
The so called “cleansing of the Temple” appears in the four Gospels (Mt 21:12-13; Mk 11:15-19; Lk 19:45-48). In this delightful disregard for a strict time line of habit among the Evangelists, John places the episode early in Jesus ministry while the rest, the synoptics place it in the week of the passion.
Cleansing is a rather tricky term, we could debate whether or not "cleansing" is the proper description of Jesus' actions. "Cleansing" implies reform -- that is, a "clean" temple will remain after Jesus' actions. The other option is that "this incident represents ... a prophetic actions symbolizing the temple's destruction" as Malina the sociologist sees it. In this case the aim is not a "clean" temple, but no temple or a completely different temple.
Traditional Christian preaching has treated this episode as an opportunity to criticize Jewish practices and perhaps a implying a subtle anti-Semitism, painting the jews as so immerse in greed that they did not care for God’s house honor.
The temple as the central coordinating institution of Jewish religion needed the animal sellers and the money changers because pilgrims visiting Israel from afar could not carry their offerings and foreign currency was not permitted in the temple except for the silver shekel. So the market place and the banks had a marriage of convenience.
But the real Jesus, the one with the full extent of human emotions, was disheveled hair, smelly and red with indignation, that Jesus throws the mechanics of temple worship into chaos, disrupting the temple system during one of the most significant feasts of the year so that neither sacrifices nor tithes could be offered that day. Counting with a very numerous and diverse audience. Jesus confronts the system itself, not simply its abuses.
Jesus challenges a religious system so embedded in its own rules and practices that it is no longer open to a fresh revelation from God, a temptation that exists for contemporary Christianity as well as for the Judaism of Jesus' day.
Why the Temple? Jesus foreshadowed the permanent cessation of sacrificial worship in Jerusalem and its replacement by his own death. His action took place during the feast of Passover, when lambs were slain to commemorate Israel's deliverance from death and bondage: Jesus would be crucified at Passover as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). If the transformation of the water at Cana identified Jesus' death as the new means of purification, the disruption of commerce in the temple anticipated the time when atonement and cleansing would be effected through his passion and resurrection.
Second, the temple in Jerusalem was the place where God made his name or glory to dwell. Although God's presence was not confined to the temple, it was generally understand that the sanctuary was, in some sense, God's dwelling place. . . . Jesus' promise of a new temple suggests that God's glory would be manifested, not in a building, but in a person, as it had been at Cana.
Third, the crucified and risen Jesus would be a unifying symbol for God's people, as the temple had been before. (New Interpreter’s Bible)
More importantly for us, Are we whipping our culture or are we going to be “whipees”? To the whipping wannabees of evangelical conservatism to provide a misnomer, to those who jump constantly to defend God’s honor, who seem to be possessors of inerrant truth, I will say, God is defended like you defend a lion, by getting out of the way. God, it seems, has never had much trouble with his enemies -- it's his friends who give him fits.
Karl Rahner, the Roman Catholic theologian put it this way: "The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim God with their mouths and deny Him with their lifestyles is what an unbelieving world finds simply unbelievable."
Are we playing the whippees? Are we as alert as we should be or are we sleeping, slumbered with so many “things” that we can not see God any more. Are we filled with just anger and indignation at the abuses perpetuated against people from Zimbabwe we are going to baptize soon, or are we worried with the unrest in Madagascar from where Gy, who quietly sits over there, comes from. Are we happy with the government lack of policy towards immigration? I am not talking about issues that are far away, in the middle of nowhere, but of people who are here, every day of their lives. People who come to this church and worship with us, break bread, drink wine and become one body with us.
Is it this economic crisis we are going through, a “Temple cleansing” of sorts?. Are we being called to go back to basics and get up out of our dross, our lethargy and apathy and finally wake up and smell the proverbial coffee. Our financial well being and our spiritual wellness go hand in hand. Are we ready to clean up our “house”, putting moral conversion as seen by Dr Hughes at the best response to the present challenges. Are we ready to try to live inspired by the Sermon of the Mountain, by the summary of the Law?, is it going to be this Lent, this Recession, this Depression, when we are going to get it, this 2009?
Who am I in the story? a seller or money changer? a buyer and worshiper? a questioner? a disciple? a whippee and or whip yielding revolutionary?
You do not have to have be radical or to join an exotic radical
movement, but in our own quiet ways around the kitchen tables, this
Lent, this Recession, decide to spend less in what we do not need,
decide to watch less TV, decide to read in between line the press,
become political active, demand and protest and write and complain, but
above all we have to finally decide if we are going to become the
change we seek. Are we ready to correct and work to do so, the seven
blunders of the world, as listed by Mahatma Ghandi 1. Wealth without
work, 2. Pleasure without conscience, 3. Knowledge without character,
4. Commerce without morality, 5. Science without humanity, 6. Worship
without sacrifice 7. Politics without principle. Have we not just
brought this Recession upon ourselves?
Theologian Helmut Thielicke once visited the United States and toured
the United Nations building in New York. When he was shown the "chapel"
in the UN building, he was appalled. It was a room decorated by
spotlights and little else. Thielicke commented:
The spotlights were ignorant of what they were illuminating, and
the responsible men who were invited to come to this room were not
shown to whom they should direct their thoughts. It was a temple of
utterly weird desolation, an empty, ruined field of faith long since
fled?only here, where the ultimate was at stake, only here was
emptiness and desolation. Would it not have been more honest to strike
the whole pseudo temple out of the budget and use the space for a
cloakroom or bar?
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